1. Field of the Invention (Technical Field)
The present invention relates to associative list processing units (ALPUs), particularly those used in handling Message Passing Interface (MPI) data packets.
2. Description of Related Art
Note that the following discussion refers to a number of publications by author(s) and year of publication, and that due to recent publication dates certain publications are not to be considered as prior art vis-a-vis the present invention. Discussion of such publications herein is given for more complete background and is not to be construed as an admission that such publications are prior art for patentability determination purposes.
The present invention provides improvements to the associative list processing unit (ALPU) described in K. D. Underwood, et al., “A hardware acceleration unit for MPI queue processing”, 19th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (April 2005), which is incorporated herein by reference. One improvement optimizes the entry management scheme to minimize internal data movement. The second allows the unit to report all matches from a request in priority order, instead of providing only the highest priority match.